The present invention relates to searching media objects.
Electronic technologies for capturing, storing, and relaying digital objects such as images, audio files, and videos are now readily available. Moreover, the increasingly common use of these technologies has resulted in large numbers of readily obtainable media objects. People make pictures using digital cameras, drawing programs, and photo-management software. They create video files with handheld video cams and burn CDs on home entertainment centers. The resulting digital objects are easily copied and stored, and can easily accumulate in an archive. They are also easily shared on the World Wide Web, or Internet—for example, by email or on a website—making large numbers of media objects available to many people.
As the number and accessibility of media objects increases, it can become increasingly difficult to manage them. For example, the larger a set of images becomes, the more difficult it can be to find a particular or desirable picture. A person may, for example, attempt to find a particular image by recalling the time it was created or the directory where it was stored. Similarly, the greater the access to audio and video files, the more difficult it can be to find a particular or desirable song or movie. A person may, for example, attempt to find a particular audio or video recording by recalling its title, or the name of its lead performer or actor. Using such information about the media objects to define the search intent can be problematic, since it may require a person to remember details about a particular object in order to find it.
A person can search a collection of media objects for particular features or aspects that are inherent to the object—not just associated with it. For example, a person can search for images that have a particular distribution of colors, shapes, and textures by specifying parameters describing these features. A person can attempt to search for images that include, for example, a specific object or person by providing a reference image and searching for images that are similar to it. Existing image search engines compare a selected reference image to images in a database, and rank those images as more or less similar to the reference. The process can be repeated, for example, using different references to search smaller subsets of the database.
Information about a media object and information from a reference object provide useful bases to search a database. However, they impose limits on the criteria that can be used for a search, and often do not adequately characterize the searcher's intent.